Mercury Music Prize

The Mercury Music Prize is a music award given annually for the best British or Irish album of the previous 12 months. It was established in 1992 as an alternative to the industry-dominated Brit awards. It was originally sponsored by the now-defunct telecoms company Mercury, followed in 1998 by Technics and starting in 2004 the Nationwide Building Society, see: Nationwide Mercury Prize

Shortlists

Each year's winner is in bold. __NOTOC__

2006 > 2005

Controversy

The Mercury Music Prize is seen as something of a controversial event in the UK. The award can in no sense be seen as representative of prevailing trends in popular music, as the winning album is selected from the shortlist by an extremely small panel of individuals from within the music industry.

Criticism is frequently focussed upon the panel being out of touch with paradigm shifts in popular trends. The 1994 event was a particularly notorious example of this, where what would prove to be hugely influential and popular albums from Britpop figureheads Paul Weller, Blur and Pulp and electronica leaders The Prodigy were overlooked in favour of the comparatively safe choice of adult contemporary artists M People.

Conversely, the shortlist has often been perceived as a desperate attempt by the panel to appear "cool" regardless of what the actual public's interests are. This occurred particularly in 1999, when Black Star Liner and Talvin Singh, who had been shoehorned into a non-existent "movement" created by the music press called Asian Underground, were selected for the shortlist. The latter's album Ok went on to win the prize, yet was bought by few consumers, who perhaps detected the cynical attempt to market a trend.

Also, the artists selected for the shortlist have in the past been prevailingly from major record labels, which has irked many independent record label owners and artists. The exclusion of independent artistes has purportedly been on the grounds of lack of sales, however the same might be said of many of the major label artists who have made the shortlist. A notorious example of this was Helicopter Girl, whose 2000 album How To Steal The World reportedly sold fewer than 1,000 copies.^*

The award has often proved to be something of a poisoned chalice, as artists who have won it have in many cases failed to repeat anything like the success of their prize-winning album. After winning in 1996 with Different Class, Pulp went on to release the grim, downbeat album This Is Hardcore, which sounded the end of the Britpop movement. Similarly, Gomez and Suede's follow-ups were greeted by disappointing sales in the context of their prize-winning debuts.

There was controversy over the 2005 award being given to Antony and the Johnsons, a British-born, but American Based act. According to Planet Sound, this kind of controversy may be repeated this year as Mark Lanegan & Isobel Campbell's Ballad of the Broken Seas is included in the shortlist, despite Lanegan not being British.

External links

Music awards

Mercury Music Prize | Mercury Music Prize | Mercury Music Prize | Mercury Music Prize

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Shortlists

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

Controversy

External links